The World's End

Published: 07 August 2013

This science fiction film combines fantasy and realism for comic effect. It is a difficult mix, but this is a film in which it succeeds.

Five men, who were friends in the ‘60s come together 20 years later to complete a pub crawl to a pub by the name of The World’s End. They travel to Newton Haven, the hometown where the pub is, to resume their drinking.

During their crawl, they start symbolically with The First Post and move from pub to pub on their 'legendary path of alcoholic indulgence' to The World’s End. They soon realise that Newton Haven looks oddly unfamiliar. The town has been taken over by aliens.

The movie is the third in a line of movies, called the Cornetto Trilogy. It follows Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007). All three movies celebrate in their own way the oddities and eccentricities of life. They have the same writing team (Wright and Pegg), the same lead main actors (Pegg and Frost), and they are all directed by Edgar Wright. The trilogy is linked by tone, rather than by content.

As college students, none of them ever made it to The World’s End which was the final pub on their list. The five men are convinced to rerun their drinking marathon by Gary King (Simon Pegg), who insists that his mates find the famous pub that they all missed the first time. In the course of their drinking, they notice that the townspeople in Newton Haven look more grim-faced than usual.

Getting into a fight with the local youths, they discover that the youths are robots that ooze a blue substance when hurt. Instead of sensibly retreating to London, they continue their crawl to find the fateful final pub. All the time while they drink, aliens from another galaxy roam the town, “merging” any humans they find into their own community.

The men drink, reminisce, argue, bond, fight, and try to re-state their identities. Each of them attempts to reconcile the past and the present, and the end of the world that they know is coming pushes them to contemplate the future.

This is a film really about male camardadiere. It is a smart comedy that is hard to categorize, and it has an obvious cult following - Peter Sheehan, ACOFB